Working in organisations managing significant change, I have often encountered Directors introducing new structures and values with little or no engagement with the people that matter, i.e. the rest of the organisation!
Directors move quickly from a personal sense of urgency directly to communicating a vision, bypassing three critical stages. No coalition has been built, The executive team is not genuinely aligned around the need for change. No structured analysis of the current culture takes place, so the new values feel abstract and imposed. No change champions are mobilised at middle management level, which is where the change process must happen..
The Director has urgency, but the organisation does not!
The 70 percent problem
John Kotter’s research at Harvard, based on analysis of over 100 organisations attempting significant change, has produced a daunting statistic: approximately 70 percent of change initiatives fail. The primary causes are not strategic or technical. They are human and processual. Leaders consistently underestimate the sequential discipline required to move an organisation through transformation.
Kotter’s eight stages are as follows:
1. Creating urgency
2. Building a coalition
3. Forming a vision
4. Enlisting a “volunteer army” (champions for change)
5. Removing barriers
6. Generating short-term wins
7. Sustaining acceleration
8. Anchoring change
Since first published in 1995, Kotter’s framework for strategy change has been ongoingly re-published and reviewed. Most recently Appelbaum and colleagues’ 2012 systematic evaluation found substantial support for the sequential logic, noting that stages often overlap and iterate but skipping them entirely almost always leads to failure.
What Kotter emphasises is that change is 70 to 90 percent leadership and only 10 to 30 percent management. Setting direction, aligning people, motivating. Not planning, budgeting, organising. This distinction matters when working with executives who default to project plans when what their organisation needs is human mobilisation.
True urgency versus false urgency
Kotter’s 2008 work indicates that “ true urgency” needed for change is a gut-level, deeply felt determination that something must change and action must begin now. False urgency is anxiety-driven activity — endless meetings, frantic emails, angry finger-pointing — producing noise without meaningful progress.
In the early 2020s Prosci’s did valuable work on benchmarking strategic change. He found that a compelling case for change is the single greatest predictor of success, yet only 34 percent of organisations rate their urgency creation as effective. Complacency and failure will occur when people focus on internal metrics rather than external realities, and when optimistic talk from senior leaders suppresses honest dialogue about threats.
What urgency actually looks like
Classic complacency, is usually hidden by rationalisation. Urgency is not a communication exercise. It is an experience design challenge. Data informs the mind, and experience moves the gut. And Kotter’s research is clear — it is gut-level urgency that predicts whether change actually happens.
Calibrating urgency across contexts
The art of urgency creation requires research-based skill and experience. Retail environments often over-index on false urgency, reacting to every competitive move. Government departments may be deeply complacent, buffered from market pressures. In the South African context, leaders are frequently navigating simultaneous pressures — international competition, rising costs, regulatory change, transformation imperatives, financial constraint — and helping them create focused urgency around a specific change without triggering overwhelm requires reflection, joint wisdom and care.
In Thornhill Associates’ leadership development programmes, we build change capability as a foundation, alongside a regulated sense of urgency. Managing urgency is not taught in most MBA programmes. It is learned through practice, feedback, and honest reflection on what worked and the difference between panic and purpose.
What this means
To go forward in a time of strategic change it is paradoxically necessary to slow down and rework the foundation. To construct a genuine case for urgency such as using business data, customer feedback, and feedback from employees. Part of this requires becoming aware of the pertinent theory, such as gained in the 3 levels of our Thornhill leadership development pathway programs.
Alongside the theory, it is important to form a cross-functional coalition that includes influential informal leaders, not just senior titles. To translate abstract values into concrete behavioural descriptions that mean something specific at every level of the organisation. Such steps shift the change process to being owned.
Modern Directors and Executives can learn from what Kotter documented decades ago and that I have seen proven repeatedly: you cannot skip stages without paying the cost later, with interest.